by Alan Draper, USATODAY

by Alan Draper, USATODAY

The leaders of the G8 are scheduled to meet next week at the Lough Erne Resort in Northern Ireland. But the summit will be more noteworthy for who attends than for what it accomplishes. When President Obama attended his first G8 summit in 2009 after his 2008 election victory, Nicolas Sarkozy from France, Silvio Berlusconi from Italy, Gordon Brown from the UK and Taro Aso from Japan were all there to welcome him to the exclusive club.

In addition, other western political leaders who came from states that were junior partners but not formal members of the G8, such as Kevin Rudd from Australia, Jan Peter Balkenende from the Netherlands, Lars Rasmussen from Denmark, and Jose Luis Zapatero from Spain were also there to greet him.

When Obama attends the G8 meeting in Northern Ireland next week, none of these political leaders will be there. Many of them were political victims of the economic recession that Obama managed to survive in the 2012 election. The president will see so many new faces at the G8 summit, he may suffer from survivor's guilt.

The presence of so many political leaders who were not there when Obama first appeared permits us to see how fragile political leadership has become. Voters are more fickle and election results are more volatile. Even forming governments after elections are held -- as in Italy and Greece -- has become challenging. This puts the 2012 U.S. election in a different light, and makes it more remarkable than we appreciated at the time.

While voters in other countries have been eagerly throwing in the cards they have hoping to draw a better hand, Americans held what they were dealt and returned the same majorities to the House and Senate as they did in 2008, and reelected the incumbent president. Compared to other western countries, the American polity looks stable, even as Americans profess to lose faith in it.

While the recession unsettled European political systems with new populist parties emerging to alter the political landscape in Britain, Italy, Greece and other countries, it left the American political system relatively unscathed. Politically disruptive domestic forces such as Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party movement have both lost momentum.

Continuity in political leadership is comforting. Better the devils you know than the ones you don't. But political stability may also be deceptive. It can easily be confused with stagnation in which politics fail to adjust to changing circumstances or alternatively, stability can be mistaken for approval when in fact pressures are building below the surface only to emerge with greater force later.

When Obama looks around the room at the G8 Summit, it will be apparent that our political system has escaped the political turnover that has jostled and unsettled other G8 states. Whether that is for better or worse is still unclear.

Alan Draper is a professor of government at St. Lawrence University.

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